President Barack Obama wipes his eye as he is seated with Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at the funeral service for the late Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, at the Washington National Cathedral, Friday, Dec. 21, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

WASHINGTON — Two United States presidents were among those who offered personal remembrances of the late Sen. Daniel Inouye in a memorial at the Washington National Cathedral Friday morning. Inouye died after respiratory complications on Monday. He was 88.

Among those who spoke at the two-hour memorial were President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Gen. Eric Shinseki. President Barack Obama called Inouye his “earliest political inspiration,” and recalled watching televised broadcasts of the senator as he helped lead the Watergate hearings in 1973. Obama was 11 that summer, and remembers gleaning a “powerful sense of hope” and for the first time an understanding about what democracy was and what it could be.

Without that inspiration, Obama said, “I might not be standing here today.”

Obama also recalled hearing the senator’s war stories — “stories full of humor, never bitterness, never boastfulness,” the president said. Inouye, who lost his right arm on an Italian battlefield in World War II, earned the Medal of Honor for his service.

“We remember a man who inspired all of us with his courage, and moved us with his compassion, that inspired us with his integrity and who taught so many of us — including a young boy growing up in Hawaii — that America has a place for everyone. May God bless Daniel Inouye. And may God grant us more souls like his.”

Former President Bill Clinton described Inouye as a close friend and an advisor, and “one of the most remarkable Americans I have ever known.”

Biden talked about Inouye as a man of loyalty, the most trusted person in Congress, and someone whom he regards in the highest esteem — much like the way he sees his own father. Biden said he remembers introducing his children to Inouye and telling them, “I wish I could be more like that man. He’s a better man than I am.”

“I think his physical courage was matched by his moral courage,” Biden said. “I don’t know anybody else that I can say that of.”

As world leaders’ voices echoed throughout the cathedral, the sense of sorrow was palpable. Many of them described Inouye’s death as “the end of an era.” Many of them told the senator, “aloha,” a final time.

After the memorial, the Washington Ringing Society orchestrated a quarter-peal of church bells over the city.

On Saturday, Inouye’s body will return home to Hawaii. He will be laid to rest in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, on the island of Oahu, where his life began 88 years ago.